The Dilexi Gallery sustained the predilection for ornamental crafts which has characterized its current season in an exhibition of small wood carvings by William Dubin whose sculptures are for the most part somewhat decorative essays in organic freeform executed in highly polished exotic hardwoods.

—Palmer D. French

Early last fall the Hansen Gallery presented a retrospective exhibition of work by the San Francisco sculptor Arlo Acton. That show contained no immediately recent work and was, in bulk, comprised of those large, somewhat neo-Dadaist, found-object assemblage-constructions (predominantly of wood) which occupied Acton during the early sixties (see Artforum, Vol. III, No. 1), most of which have received sufficiently frequent local exposure over the past few years to have become quite familiar to the majority of Bay Area gallery-goers and museum habitués.

Recently, the Hansen Gallery staged the second

Kinetic showmanship with some buffoonery also held sway at the Quay Gallery, which featured a veritable carnival of bright colored, noisy devices contrived by Charles Mattox. In contrast, however, to Acton’s vaudeville slapstick and burlesque double entendres, the Mattox exhibits were all good clean fun for the kiddies, and the show as a whole exuded the seasonally appropriate atmosphere of a novelty toy shop before Christmas: here was Mattox’s kinetic wizardry in its most jovial and Harlequinesque aspects, together with a few elaborate gadgets resembling the more imaginative sort of stage props

The newly opened A.L.A. Gallery (Arlene Lind Associates) presented the first one man show of paintings by Mark Shroeder, a recent graduate of the California College of Arts and Crafts. These exhibits comprised a series of rather morbid biomorphic fantasies combining sexual and pathological anatomical allusions in a manner definitely not designed for comfortable contemplation by the squeamishly impressionable; for here was a kaleidoscope of imagery that seemed like the nightmares of a hypochondriacal nervous breakdown—imagery obviously inspired by medical illustrations of organic deformities,

Another young artist’s debut show was featured by the Michael Walls Gallery in presenting paintings by Barbara Barengo, whose lyrical abstractions in subdued, opaque colors, expounding highly involved, composed relationships of well defined shapes, color masses and linear rhythms, represent not only a rejection of Abstract Expressionism but likewise a turning away from the rigid and quasi technological schematism associated with Op and Hard Edge techniques, toward a re examination of some of the approaches to the esthetics and dynamics of abstraction that prevailed a half century ago.

In such

At the Bolles Gallery, Frederic Hobbs exhibited drawings, mixed media graphics, and paintings on paper, together with a small selection of molded fiberglass sculptures. Hobbs is a good draftsman; his ink drawings and sepia-toned acrylic/ink gouaches are powerful and articulate. Their larger than life, expressionistic bravura repertoire, religious, mythological and Bacchanalian imagery, in juxtapositions at once poignant and sardonic, present a compelling revival of the spirit, themes and style of Heinrich Kley. Here, too, but slightly metamorphosized, is Kley’s cloven-hoofed and taloned Witches’